Miracles still happen
and where better than in Venice?The place itself is a miracle, a lagoon
town built on stilts.Across the water
the LidodiVenezia, home of the film festival, stands guard
over Greater Venezia, an island sandspit
on eternal sentry duty between man-made atoll and Adriatic Sea.

One miracle – this
archipelago in northern Italy – so easily begets
another.Moments of wonder are now a
fixture at the Venicefilmfest.
At this year’s Mostra del Cinema, buffeted by
sunsets, bashed by fine weather, whacked about by wine and good food, we were
in no mood to resist.The Israeli film
LEBANON came; we saw; we were
conquered.We knew it was
special.We each melted down whatever
gold we had – pens, dental fillings, nipple rings – and put the wager on Israel for the Golden Lion.

A film set almost
entirely inside the 40 square feet of a military tank’s interior.As the armoured
juggernaut advances into enemy danger during the 1982 Lebanon war it dawns on
us – if a dawn can last 90 minutes – that we have not left, are not leaving
and will never leave this space.It is
dank, dark and impacted with its own Moloch life.The hatch-door in the tank’s top opens only
to let in something worse: a corpse deposited for storage, a gibbering Syrian
prisoner and his tormenting escort. Then the hatch-door shuts again.Virtual blackness re-engulfs.Claustrophobes,
take doctor’s advice before buying a ticket.

All good art comes out
of an artist’s life, by way of his heart, mind, soul.Filmmaker Samuel Maoz,
47, was himself a tank gunner in the 1982 war.Emotionally lacerated, he spent 25 years
hoping his wounds would heal.He
tried, and for two decades failed, to write a script to help the curing process.When he realised
the scars were there forever,, his confrontation
with the truth triggered the creative moment.He took up his pen and worked.The script was written in four weeks.Cicatrices became cinema.

LEBANON is unnerving and
unforgettable from the opening scene. The tank – or more exactly our
juddering, near-monochrome view out from the tank through its cross-haired
gun sight – charges full speed into a dense banana grove as if no obstacle
stood in its way.The moment wallops
our perceptual understanding.Clearly
the laws of nature, motion and geography do not apply to this machine when
mobilized for war.

Soon, though, the
metal Godzilla is itself at bay.We
feel the panic as two successive civilian vehicles come charging at it, along
the improvised warpath taking shape in the banana grove’s heart, and the
gunner (YoavDonat,
playing the director’s fictive alter ego, must decide whether he stays his
hand or shoots to blow the vehicles apart.After that virtually every choice is between life and death.Part of LEBANON’s impact is in its
historical timing.In today’s heyday
of asymmetrical warfare and IEDs – of Davids outfighting Goliaths, of the have-nots sticking it
to the haves – of do-it-yourself booby traps outwitting top-dollar hardware –
every campaign and every war is a lottery.And every theatre of conflict is a level battlefield.

But if every choice –
to more hair-trigger effect today than ever – is between life and death, Maoz’s movie shows that even those alternatives are riddled
with complexity.Saving your friends
by killing your foes; sparing your foes and thereby killing your friends;
assuming a danger – an explosive-packed oncoming car – where there may be
none; assuming a safe ally – the Christian Phalangist who brings the captured
Syrian- when there may be none.The
Phalangist, a Trojan incursor whose entry into the
plot proves deadlier than the Syrian’s, is the devil ex machinain a scene of perfect horror.Speaking Arabic, he taunts the prisoner
with a litany of promised tortures and barbarities, then turns to the tank
crew and says, in their language, “Treat him carefully, he’s a prisoner of
war.” Promising to lead the crew to safety, if they only follow him, the
Phalangist then departs into the night – into the bomb-ruined maze of a city
where the tank has ended up – and becomes the tank’s Jack o’Lantern
leading it (the audience and the crew both suspect) to disaster.

There has surely never
been a film squeezed for so long into so confined a space. It makes a submarine
movie seem like a western. Only two book-ending shots are set outside the
tank.Two shots of sunflower fields,
waving with the kitsch lyricism of a travel poster.Between those poles of optimism, Maoz fits us into his iron maiden and slams the door. The ‘outside world’ is seen only through the
gun sights.It is barely heard at
all.The main acoustic is the turning,
grinding, winching noise of the turret as it changes our viewpoint moment by
moment: up, down, leftward, rightward, like some robotic madman dictating our
world-view by an ear-tormenting semaphore of right angles.

Every soldier in the
tank is a good soldier; every soldier in the tank is mentally going to
pieces.That is not a contradiction, it is just war; or the guerilla
war-with-machines that was the 1982 Lebanon conflict.In one seriocomic coup de cinema, Maoz splatters the tank’s interior walls with soup
croutons after a packet explodes when the vehicle takes a hit.The grisly pieces rain down the greasy
metal flanks at the speed of about one inch per hour.They are like tears transformed into junk
snacking, or junk snacking transformed into tears.

Finally the tension,
anguish, uncertainty, confinement – the sense (again for both audience and
crew) of living inside a metal carapace controlled not by us but by our foes
and tormentors – become too much. The tank makes a dash for it.It charges blind into the maze of streets,
seeking an escape route, as it charged seemingly blind into the banana grove.LEBANON says there is a limit
to the limits human beings will accept, even in the disciplined nightmare of
war, even if the war is dictated by national necessity or alleged just cause.

Count the conditional
in that sentence.Don’t they tell
their own story?How many ‘ifs’ must a
nation muster – or can a nation get away with – when it mobilizes men for
battle?LEBANON makes the point for us, in as charged and focused a war movie as this
millennium has given us.Men are not
machines.Machines are machines.In good times they may be good for each
other.But in times of fire, when the
fire is strong enough to melt both metal and men’s minds, they are just raw
material destined to fuse together in the furnace.The tank in LEBANON, like the tank’s
crew, is hero and villain at once, sealed in a symbiotic oneness, seared
together for the sepulcher or, if lucky, spared for a chastened and eternally
haunted survival.

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.